This Capricorn New Moon falls on Christmas Eve,
inviting us to let "love bloom bright and wild' on the most magical night of
the year. Can we open ourselves to
Spirit, to our passionate heart which loves unconditionally, so there is room
in our "inn' for this divine birth? Whether we celebrate the rebirth of the
Light at Winter Solstice as Yule, Hanukkah, Christmas or Kwanzaa, let's
remember the Mother who gives birth to the Light of the World. She is Mother Earth, Mother Mary and the
Feminine Spirit within each of us. We
all get a chance to give birth to our deepest Light in this darkest time of
year.

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Our wild, passionate feminine nature is the ground
of our being. She is strong and full of
Life! Matter is Spirit's manifestation
on this physical plane. It is the container of the spark of Spirit's life. We are taught by our patriarchal religions to
treat our bodies as "temples of spirit' but then they judge and condemn what
that spirit wants to experience. When we
have a belief system that demonizes and desensitizes the physical plane, the
feminine and women, we are denying our place and purpose here on Earth. Under patriarchy, this feminine nature has
been colonized, raped, used and then ignored. But when we ignore the wisdom of
our intuitive, feeling consciousness and our instinctual life of the body, life
becomes bleak indeed, as we can see around us. We've ignored this feminine knowing to our own detriment - a
polluted environment gives rise to virulent diseases; depleted resources create
competition and wars; inequality gives rise to cruelty and violence. The light touch of feminine love and
compassion is missing in global politics.
We can bring it back in our personal responsibility.

The lost Feminine Spirit is needed to give birth
to our new society. Otherwise, we'll
just get the same old society, wrapped in sheep's clothing. The Feminine sees
matter as Mother, as Sacred. We are spirits
having a human experience. Our feminine
consciousness connects us to dis-incarnate Spirit -- it is our direct line to
our spiritual awareness which helps us to cooperate with each other, to see
holistic solutions to our common problems and to co-create our world, which is
our purpose for being here. It is Feminine
Spirit which is open enough to the "unseen real' to conceive and give birth to
a new order of consciousness and Being.
That's why we celebrate this season as a Birth -- the Mother is ready to
give birth to the next stage in our collective evolution.

Winter
Solstice and the Capricorn New Moon

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Winter Solstice, arriving on December 21-22, marks
another turn of the Wheel of the Year, the point in the cycle where the Sun
once again "stands still' in the sky for three days in the far South (where our
southern neighbors are celebrating Summer Solstice!). Our ancient ancestors celebrated this promise
of the return of summer with feasts and gift-giving and decorations of
ever-green branches to remind them of the life that had disappeared under the
snows of Winter. This is another fire
festival, the wheel of life marking a change in our relationship with the
Sun. Don't forget to light a fire and
look into the flames, opening your imagination to the pictures there. Let your
imagination soar! What are you going to
Birth in this next year? In the next few weeks, although it might not feel like
it, the light will slowly begin to return in the northern hemisphere -- with the
promise of summer to come.

Cathy Pagano is the author of a new book, "Wisdom's Daughters: How Women Can Change the World". Cathy trained at the C. G. Jung Institut-Zurich in dream interpretation, then got her M.A. in Counseling Psychology in Feminine Spirituality, and along the way became a certified Life Coach. As an astrologer and storyteller, she weaves the Cosmic Stories written in the stars and from The Bard's Grove, comments on emerging archetypal themes in movies.
Cathy works with the tools of the imagination - dreams, alchemy, myths, astrology, symbolic language, storytelling, ritual - to awaken the Soul's wisdom.

I believe that Americans are called to a higher consciousness at this point in our history. We are called on to live up to our ideals and create the country our forefathers imagined. Inner consciousness needs to be acted upon for social justice.

Cathy believes that our writers and artists must take up our responsibility to create art that inspires, teaches and heals our humanity.